Address Book won't restore contacts from .abbu

My Address Book won't restore contacts from my address book archive (.abbu). I sync my address book with iCloud. A couple weeks ago Address Book told me there were some inconsistancies in my contacts. It said that 12 of my contacts were outdated; the "updated" versions that it presented were actually versions that were older by several weeks or months. I told Address Book repeatly to ignore the changes so it kept on asking me. I exported my correct contacts as a .abbu file. I also back up with Time Machine so I should have a good copy there. I deleted a "bad" contact from my Address Book, and then tried to import the .abbu file, the contact I deleted appeared for a second and then disappeared. I then deleted my entire Address Book. I tried again to import the .abbu file. All the contacts appeared for a second and then disappeared. This happen when iCloud was added in perferences and syncing and when it wasn't. Deleting the file AddressBook folder in ~/ApplicationSupport/ also didn't help.